1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a base station that has a function to distribute video data provided by a distribution server to a mobile station that is located within a wireless area managed by the base station, on the basis of a video data distribution request sent from the mobile station, and further relates to a video distribution system comprising the base station and the mobile station, and a distribution control method of the video distribution system.
2. Related Background Art
There has been conventionally proposed a number of technologies related to a video distribution service in an IP network (see, for example, Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication No. 2003-153338). The video distribution service has been developed recently as a service for distributing broadcast video data by using a fixed communication network in, mainly, a communication service field for fixed communication networks. A characteristic of a fixed communication network is that a receiver can exclusively use lines during distribution of video data. Therefore, distribution of a high-quality video can be realized without affecting distribution of video data to other receiver.
In contrast to the video distribution service for fixed communication networks described above, in a video distribution service for mobile communication networks, a plurality of mobile stations share the capacity of transmission of a wireless zone connecting the mobile stations to a mobile communication network, whereby a video is distributed. For this reason, in the case in which a mobile station requests for video data that has at least the available transmission capacity of the wireless zone, the transmission capacity in the wireless zone might run short, and the quality of the video distribution service for the other mobile stations sharing the transmission capacity of the wireless zone might be deteriorated.